Japanese photography Daido Moriyama - Stray Dog
Daido Mariyama was born in 1938 in Ikeda, a town outside Osaka. He chose
his profession in 1961 and moved to Tokyo where he became the leading Japanese
photographer. His art reflects on the clash between traditional and postwar
Japan. The island was pervaded by Americanism and encountered the victory
march of consumerism. This was at the same time perceived as threat and
liberation. Moriyama's photographs represent Japanese Existentialism. His
work is influenced by West and East, by William Klein (he saw his book
New
York in 1958) and Andy Warhol as well as by Yukio Mishima and Shuji
Terayama. Moriyama visualizes the drama, severity and rapidity of change.
His photographs are grainy, full of hard contrasts, intentionally rough,
murky and quickly developed.
Moriyama's signature picture, the stray dog on the streets of Misawa
(a small town in the northern Japan that hosted an American air force base),
"shows the rangy outsider, a haunted figure, mysterious and powerful, familiar
with his sourroundings and alien to them." Most of his pictures were made
for the famous postwar photo magazine Camera Mainichi and he published
his first book, Nippon Theater, in 1968.
The exhibition "Daido Moriyama - Stray Dog" was put together by the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and organized with the Japan Society
Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Folkwang
Museum in Essen (Germany) and the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland).
Rainbow Bridge, Odaiba, Tokyo, 1995-98
copyright Takashi Homma
Japanese photography: Takashi Homma - Tokyo Suburbia
Takashi Homma was born in 1962 in Tokyo where he lives and works. As
the exhibition title indicates, this series of photographs portrays the
suburbs of Tokyo. Especially his works showing neat houses and empty streets
have a hard and hopeless tone. Homma portrays - with a certain distance
- the dark side of the economic success that leaves little room for the
realization of individual dreams in cold and sterile suburbs. He shows
no people in this series of photos.
Since 1992, Homma has published his works in magazines like Switch
and Elle-Deco (Tokyo), Purple Prose and Purple Fashion
(Paris). Among his previous publications are: Baby Land, Little
More, Tokyo, 1995; Tokyo Suburbia, Korinsha Press, Kyoto, 1997;
Manga
Camera, Rockin'on, Tokyo (a special issue of H magazine), 1999.
Fotomuseum Winterthur: January 29 - March 26,
2000.
